Sales and Marketing Alignment: Key Metrics To Align Your Teams

Marketing celebrates hitting their MQL targets while sales complains about lead quality. Sales claims they're crushing their outreach while marketing wonders why their content isn't being used. Sound familiar?

Most companies are measuring success through two completely different lenses, creating a disconnect that costs them millions in wasted opportunities. High-growth companies take a radically different approach. Instead of letting each team chase their own metrics, they unite both departments around key performance indicators that actually drive revenue. Simpler said than done, we know.

This post walks you through the key metrics you need to focus on to align your sales and marketing teams. For each, we’ll give tips on rallying both teams around the KPIs that really matter.

Sales and Marketing Alignment: What Most Brands Get Wrong

Before we discuss the metrics you can use to align your sales and marketing teams, let’s examine the central question behind this post: Why do so many brands struggle with sales and marketing alignment?

Most companies aren't struggling because their teams are incompetent or unwilling to work together. They're struggling because they're solving the wrong problems. Let's dive into what's really causing the disconnect and why traditional solutions often miss the mark.

Let’s return to the example from our introduction: marketing celebrating crushing their MQL goals while sales gripes that all of Marketing’s leads suck. Why? We have a communication breakdown. Let me explain.

Your front-line sales reps are having daily conversations with prospects and customers. They're hearing real-time feedback about:

Why deals are really being lost
What competitors are offering
Which features actually matter to customers
Common objections and concerns

But where do these golden insights go?

Let’s be realistic: often, they go absolutely nowhere. If these insights do get passed on, they’ll be filtered through layers of management, transformed into sanitized reports, and finally reach marketing as vague, generalized insights that have lost their practical value. By the time marketing creates content or campaigns based on this information, it's outdated or has lost its teeth.

Think about it: When was the last time your content marketing team sat in on actual sales calls? Or when did your sales team provide direct input on marketing campaigns before they launched?

Your teams are misaligned because they’re working as separate teams on separate targets. This misalignment isn't just frustrating — it's expensive. It shows up as:

Marketing campaigns that generate the wrong kinds of leads
Sales conversations that don't align with marketing promises
Wasted budget on initiatives that don't move the revenue needle
Lost opportunities due to disconnected follow-up processes
Decreased employee morale as teams blame each other for missed targets

So, what’s the answer? Bringing your Sales and Marketing teams together by helping them rally around metrics that actually matter. The key to better alignment isn't just better communication or, God forbid, more meetings — it's about fundamentally rethinking how we measure success and structure our teams around shared outcomes.

With this in mind, let’s explore the key metrics you should be rallying your Sales and Marketing teams around.

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Revenue: The North Star Metric

Let’s start with the obvious: revenue.

Okay, it might sound obvious, but in reality, many companies have their marketing team completely divorced from revenue targets. But this is a critical mistake. Revenue is your organization’s true north: the single point that all your teams should navigate toward.

Focusing on revenue means:

Moving beyond the "MQL vs. SQL" mindset and tracking shared pipeline metrics
Setting collective revenue targets that both teams own together (yes, marketing should have revenue targets!)
Implementing systems to track direct revenue contribution from specific marketing initiatives
Measuring how effectively sales converts marketing-generated leads compared to other sources
Creating joint quarterly revenue goals that encourage collaboration rather than competition

When both teams share revenue responsibility, the conversation shifts from "marketing isn't generating enough leads" or "sales isn't following up properly" to "how can we work together to hit our revenue targets?"

Customer Journey Engagement Metrics

Next, you need to focus on your customer engagement metrics. How do your prospects interact with your brand before becoming customers? What does your buyer's journey look like? What drives conversions?

When considering customer engagement metrics, you should focus on tracking how prospects engage with your content across different channels, the typical timeframe between first engagement and ultimate conversion, and patterns in how prospects interact with your pages.

Then, dig a little deeper! What is the relationship between content engagement and meeting conversions? Are there specific pages or marketing resources that always seem to lead to great (or terrible) sales calls? You should also look at how social media interactions influence your deals.

Understanding these patterns helps both teams create more effective touchpoints throughout the customer journey, rather than working in isolation on their respective halves of the funnel.

Response Time and Follow-Up Metrics

Next, align your team around follow-up and response timeline metrics. Your team needs to be consistently responsible throughout the entire sales process to ensure no opportunities fall through the cracks. Some key areas to monitor include:

How quickly your team responds to content downloads (24 hours should be your maximum)
The gap between marketing qualification and first sales contact
Whether follow-up sequences are being completed as designed
The correlation between response timing and meeting booking success

Remember: The best lead in the world won't convert if your follow-up isn't timely and relevant. Make follow-up and timing a shared metric and watch the infamous “marketing-to-sales” handoff smooth out like butter.

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Deal Velocity Metrics

Finally, your Sales and Marketing teams need to align on your deal velocity metrics. In other words, how quickly and effectively deals move through your pipeline. These metrics help you understand where deals are getting stuck and how to keep them moving.

Focus on measuring:

The average time from the first marketing touch to the closed deal
How quickly deals progress through each pipeline stage
Which marketing content actually accelerates deal closure
Conversion rates at each critical pipeline stage
The relationship between content engagement and deal size

Understanding deal velocity helps both teams optimize their efforts for faster, more predictable revenue growth. For example, you might discover that prospects who engage with certain types of content close 30% faster — that's information both sales and marketing can act on.

Pro Tip: Start tracking these metrics gradually. Don't try to measure everything at once. Pick the metrics that align most closely with your current business challenges and expand from there.

Master Sales and Marketing Alignment The Easy Way

By now, you have the foundational metrics and strategies needed to start breaking down those stubborn silos between your Sales and Marketing teams. When your teams stop working against each other and start working together toward these common goals, you’ll start to see those silos break down.

But here's the truth: metrics and alignment are just the beginning of your journey. To truly transform your revenue engine, you need more than aligned teams — you need them working together like a well-oiled machine, with marketing consistently generating high-quality leads that sales can knock out of the park.

Want to skip the trial and error and implement a proven system for sales and marketing success? We've packaged all our best strategies, templates, and frameworks into our comprehensive Growth Playbook. It's the same system we've used to help dozens of companies achieve record-breaking revenue growth.

Check out the Growth Playbook for free today to get started.

Mallory is a Growth Marketer at Lean Labs, working with brands to ignite their growth engine through conceptualizing, implementing, and optimizing growth marketing strategies.

5 Min Read

Growth Team

Dec 26, 2024